Engineering Is Child’s Play
Preschool children can build more than just structures with blocks.
By Zachary S. Gold, James Elicker, Carly D. Evich, Aura Ankita Mishra, Nina Howe, and Abigail E. Weil
Scholars have extensively studied the engineering design process in secondary and postsecondary education; however, research examining engineering thinking in early childhood is limited. At the same time, psychologists know that young children’s cognitive abilities, such as spatial reasoning, mathematics, executive functioning, and planning, are related to success in school. Our recent study harnessed the strengths of engineering-focused curriculum and psychologists’ understanding of how children learn. We found that framing preschool children’s play with blocks as an engineering design process supports their cognitive development, specifically executive function and planning.
Researchers at SUNY Oswego, Purdue University, and Concordia University developed the engineering play framework, a perspective for understanding children’s play with blocks as an early engineering design process. We found that language and behavior interactions during play resemble the social teamwork and design processes of adult engineers. Nine observable engineering play behaviors reflect the ways children engineer with peers: communicating goals, building behaviors, problem-solving, creative and innovative actions, solution-testing and evaluating design, explaining how things are built or work, following patterns and prototypes, logical and mathematical thinking, and use of technical vocabulary.
In 2017, we recruited 110 preschoolers (twenty-seven with diagnosed speech and language disabilities) from ten classrooms in the midwestern United States. We filmed the children during play with a same-gender peer in fifty-five pairs. Each pair received a set of approximately one hundred hardwood blocks and was asked to discuss a building plan (for example, making a castle, rocket ship, or robot), after which the children built for fifteen minutes uninterrupted. We observed and documented how often children with and without disabilities used engineering play in their building and administered formal tests of executive function and planning to each child.
The preschoolers who used more engineering play behaviors during their time with the blocks scored higher in executive function and planning skills. This finding was strongest for the children with diagnosed disabilities, suggesting that framing play as engineering may particularly benefit special education.
Our study furthers research on early childhood STEM education and cognitive development and represents an important interdisciplinary collaboration between engineering educators and psychologists. Scholars and practitioners can use the new framework to observe, evaluate, and support young children’s engineering thinking informally during classroom play activities, including in special education classrooms. In particular, teachers should consider observing children during free play with blocks or other kinds of manipulatives and jotting down notes about their conversations, vocabulary, building actions, and other behaviors that indicate engineering learning. This is a useful method for comparing and contrasting children’s current STEM skills and discovering individuals’ specific cognitive needs. These kinds of comparisons could help us understand how to bridge academic achievement gaps between typically developing preschoolers and children with developmental delays.
This research was the first published study to directly connect young children’s engineering thinking with their cognitive skills and one of the first to observe preschoolers with disabilities in an engineering education context. More research is needed to understand how engineering play can be used to support children’s early STEM development and learning in a variety of education contexts and with children from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Zachary S. Gold is an assistant professor in the department of human development at the State University of New York at Oswego. James Elicker is a professor emeritus in the department of human development and family studies at Purdue University, where Carly D. Evich is a graduate research assistant and Abigail E. Weil is an undergraduate research assistant. Aura A. Mishra is a postdoctoral associate in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center. Nina Howe is a professor in the department of education, and research chair in early childhood development and education, at Concordia University in Montreal. This article was adapted from “Engineering Play as an Informal Learning Context for Executive Function and Planning” in the October 2021 Journal of Engineering Education.
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